A Brief Note on Looking at Water
Sunday November 15, 2009
This morning, I realised that I had been sitting at my desk far too long, and – looking out of the window and seeing that it was one of those luminous late autumn days – I switched off the computer and we headed out for a walk by the river, which runs not far from where we live, in a pocket of wildness that cuts through the city. It was a truly glorious morning – a heron flapping away from the pond as we passed, horses ambling around the fields, and the river full and fast-flowing. As we stood by the river, I found myself recollecting a line that I stumbled upon in Sarah Allen’s wonderful book The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue
Back when I was in my teens, I nurtured dreams of becoming a painter, and I often used to go out with my paints and canvasses – either alone, or with friends – and sit by the river to try to paint what I saw. And although I produced one or two half-way decent paintings (which we then sold at the local market to tourists, in an early, but brief, flurry of entrepreneurial acumen) it always seemed to me that there was something essentially uncapturable about this flow. At one moment you could take in the shadows of the trees on the surface of the river, at another moment you could take in the depths beneath (and if you were particularly lucky, see a long pike lurking, half-camouflaged against the bottom of the river), at another moment you could take in the flicker of light on the surface of the river, and at another you could follow the movement of the small waves made by the wind; but you could never see the whole river. Sometimes I would try to find exactly the right way of looking, so that I could see the river as it was, but this effort was always in vain. Rivers are not, I suppose, the kinds of things that can be captured so easily as this. You can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus…), or even once (Cratylus…), or perhaps it is the case there is ultimately no river that we can grasp, and nobody who does the stepping (Nāgārjuna…)
These are the kinds of thoughts that begin to preoccupy you when you start looking at water with the kind of artfulness of which, I imagine, Mencius might have approved. Because this is not just about rivers, but it is also about perception: if there is an art to looking at water, and if there is no rule for art (as Kant insists – if I will be permitted the liberty of leaping so blithely from Mencius to Kant with hardly a murmur), then there is no correct way of looking at water. Indeed, singleness of view, I found out when I was trying to paint the river back in my teenage years, was the very thing that led to the loss of the river; and when this happened, the painting went dead. Then I’d realise that I had just captured the surface but not the depth, the depth but not the surface; or I had captured the movement of the wind but not the play of the light. Yet occasionally – very occasionally, because I was not nearly as skilled or as patient as I wished to be – I would make a few brushstrokes that would somehow bring to life not just one or other thing, but the surface and the depth, the light and the shadow, the pike beneath the water and the waves whipped up by the wind.
If all of this might be saying something about perception, then it may be saying something about the perception of things other than rivers: people, rocks, stones, washing machines, organisations, ideas… For perhaps there is an art to looking at these things, too (why, after all, should water be the only thing we can look at in this artful fashion?); and perhaps this art is precisely that of keeping a kind of fluidity to the way that we are seeing, so that we can take in now this, now that: the pike, the shimmer on the surface, the abandoned shopping trolley sinking in the mud, the shadows of the trees and those of the birds the pass momentarily overhead…
The lovely image that accompanies this post comes, as usual, from Wikimedia Commons, and is by the twelfth and thirteenth century painter Ma Yuan
#2 · Zaidi Ademeit
17 November 2009
Yes! God, and all the other names he is called by, is in the details, but it is only God that sees the whole painting, which is our reach that exceeds our grasp!! Thank you for such a beautiful mental stimulation.
#3 · raja farooq
28 November 2009
the beautiful look of dark navy blue water shimmering underneath an opal moon is both hauntingly mysterious and very romantic as well. a place for lover’s trysts. and the image of a roaring river in full swing is depicted in herman hesse’s novel siddartha (towards the end). the river is speaking ten billion languages all at the same time. we only have to listen deeply and decipher the tongues upon tongues and the rest will follow…
#1 · Moreclick
17 November 2009
Thanks for sharing, I love reading you should post more often…